What vampires MUST be

[Torkuda]

Again, a good example of this kind of writing is the 90s cartoon Roswell. They just called vampire like aliens "vampires".

Back to this. As I'm not familiar with this cartoon nor your story I have to ask:
Is the reader aware from the get-go that the vampire is an alien (or genetically modified as in your story)?

I guess for your story the answer is "no", but how did Roswell handle it? Because if the answer for that is "yes", you have one heck of a difference.

By the time the vampires show up in the Roswell series, the audience has already been introduced to the idea that every mythological creature is going to be an alien. They don't know what werewolves are because when they show up because they're in episode one and the plot hasn't been fully explained yet.

Same with my vampires, they're on page one and the plot hasn't been explained yet.

 

[dangoball]

I'll just answer the points in turn.

Vampires call themselves vampires because, why change it? They often look down on humans, but still, why quibble over names?


If you have one cover up name you MUST use in public and one you CAN use in private, logic kind of dictates that over time you would stop using the one you CAN use, or eventually you would just blow your cover. Also yes, that is for the reader. Yes, one little detail like that can be kept track of, but over time, it all adds up. A lot of the writing process is throwing out stuff you don't need because people aren't following. I think its enough to remember that vampires were made by space aliens and they rebelled and were driven underground in a war. Asking the reader to also remember the name the aliens gave them, the name the vampires gave themselves and the name the werewolves gave them, would become taxing. One race the "banshees" has many different names from many different cultures, few of which are ever brought up in story. For the sake of simplicity they're called either Banshees or "spirits of vengeance"... banshees for short.

Why change it? Because of cultural heritage. Because it's a way to self-identify. Because names have power. Would Spitfire induce fear and awe if it were called Spitwater? We all know that what logic dictates is not what always happen, because pride is also a powerful driving force and determiner. A secret society has a name no one else uses and even if they have a cover name, they will still use their real name among their own (The Institute for Mental Health and Sanity will still call it's inner members Brothers and Sisters of Cthulu).
The alien-given name can be safely forgotten as it serves no purpose, the vampire "in-name" would serve two purposes: 1) within story, for the vampires to set their kind apart and 2) outside the story, for the reader to get a hint of some of the mystery at play.

Same with my vampires, they're on page one and the plot hasn't been explained yet.

See, that's the thing. The reader doesn't know and so he presumes. And from the reaction you have described those presumptions work against your work, so some hint to start nibbling at it before you go all "BAM! Vampires are aliens!" out of the blue might be a good idea.

 

[Torkuda]

I'll just answer the points in turn.

Vampires call themselves vampires because, why change it? They often look down on humans, but still, why quibble over names?


If you have one cover up name you MUST use in public and one you CAN use in private, logic kind of dictates that over time you would stop using the one you CAN use, or eventually you would just blow your cover. Also yes, that is for the reader. Yes, one little detail like that can be kept track of, but over time, it all adds up. A lot of the writing process is throwing out stuff you don't need because people aren't following. I think its enough to remember that vampires were made by space aliens and they rebelled and were driven underground in a war. Asking the reader to also remember the name the aliens gave them, the name the vampires gave themselves and the name the werewolves gave them, would become taxing. One race the "banshees" has many different names from many different cultures, few of which are ever brought up in story. For the sake of simplicity they're called either Banshees or "spirits of vengeance"... banshees for short.

Why change it? Because of cultural heritage. Because it's a way to self-identify. Because names have power. Would Spitfire induce fear and awe if it were called Spitwater? We all know that what logic dictates is not what always happen, because pride is also a powerful driving force and determiner. A secret society has a name no one else uses and even if they have a cover name, they will still use their real name among their own (The Institute for Mental Health and Sanity will still call it's inner members Brothers and Sisters of Cthulu).
The alien-given name can be safely forgotten as it serves no purpose, the vampire "in-name" would serve two purposes: 1) within story, for the vampires to set their kind apart and 2) outside the story, for the reader to get a hint of some of the mystery at play.

Same with my vampires, they're on page one and the plot hasn't been explained yet.

See, that's the thing. The reader doesn't know and so he presumes. And from the reaction you have described those presumptions work against your work, so some hint to start nibbling at it before you go all "BAM! Vampires are aliens!" out of the blue might be a good idea.

Well technically in story they're NOT aliens, and they have several vampire traits. Truth is, even from the prologue, you don't know what about them is different, but it's clear something is. They're in the daylight for one. For two, they have children. (Course again, in the prologue, you don't even know they're vampires. That's explained much later. It's a prologue. Mostly the point is to set up a character, not explain the mythos.)

 

[dangoball]

Well technically in story they're NOT aliens, and they have several vampire traits. Truth is, even from the prologue, you don't know what about them is different, but it's clear something is. They're in the daylight for one. For two, they have children. (Course again, in the prologue, you don't even know they're vampires. That's explained much later. It's a prologue. Mostly the point is to set up a character, not explain the mythos.)

That was a hyperbole.

The point I'm trying to make is that you obviously don't consider that name - label - "vampire" important, your feedback (that which you have presented us with and here in this very thread) states otherwise, though. If your reader has trouble accepting your vampires as vampires, give them something else to call them. Let the story characters call your monster vampires or whatever, have your monster call them self something different for the reader's convenience.

snip

Not what I would consider constructive criticism but you brought me to a question that might be worth answering.

Torkuda, those dragons are "real" dragon dragons or some kind of alien creature the aliens brought? Second option looks ok without reading your story (i don't really have time for that right now), the first one seems a bit lore breaking, because if all the "mythological" creatures are mutants using cover names, having fire-breathing dragons on Earth is a bit weird. Stay consistent.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

I think the only absolute constant about vampires is the need for blood. The sunlight thing is very common but there have been vampire stories where sunlight didn't harm them. Everything else is ancillary and optional and up to the discretion of the writer du jour.

 

[EternallyBored]

Vampire mythos has some commonalities, that others here have already listed, they aren't all necessary, and if you're creative enough, you can probably get away with violating one or more of the established features that most see in vampires. That's sort of the issue though, you have to be good enough to make people like your changes, otherwise they pick apart your portrayal because it failed to maintain their suspension of disbelief. Meyer gets a lot of crap, but the Twilight vampires have pretty standard vampire traits except the whole sparkling thing, people just tend to lump the vampires into their criticism because they are so poorly written in the series.


Your concept on the other hand...

Look there's really no nice way to put this, the concept you briefly describe raises so many of my bad writing red flags, I can understand why people are criticizing it right off the bat. Just from your description, we are mixing sci-fi with fantasy (so this is a world with both aliens and dragons, does it have real magic too?), you've got a really cliche "fighting your emotions or instincts or whatever, basically we just need to give our shapeshifting half-dragons an excuse to be angsty", and you've got a character with a name that sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon villain. one step above Sergeant deathslaughter. Does lord Maelstrom shake his fist in the air and yell, "I'll get you next time G.I. Joe!" when he is inevitably defeated by the people who don't have massively silly names? The whole alien creation thing just comes off as silly too, if the aliens are powerful enough to create this new race that totally outclasses humans, then they didn't really need help harvesting humans to begin with, unless these are the terminally stupid type of alien that basically get killed because they are massive morons.

Even if the vampire label is there as a coverup, you've got a species that could easily fall under a dozen or more different mythological labels, the vampire distinction seems arbitrary at best. That's sort of the issue here, just describing them makes me instantly think of at least a dozen or more completely different things you could coverup such creatures as. To get away with labeling them vampires, would require some slick writing on your part, make the reader believe that this coverup is justified in labeling these things as vampires, even with the differences, if you write it well enough, the reader will usually be willing to overlook it. Fail, and the reader might start to see your vampire label as a cynical half-assed attempt to glomp on to the popularity of a currently popular mythological creature.

 

[tzimize]

-snip-

My thought is: If you're gonna create a story about something that is mostly not a vampire, why do you have to call it a vampire?

If you're gonna invent some new being, why not invent a new name too?

Fresh interpretations of classic material can be cool. I loved for example the recent animation Rise of the Guardians. It had a fresh take on a lot of figures, but it kept a lot of the base. Thats how you should do it. In MY opinion.

I remember some time ago I watched one of the vampire movies about that chick in black leather who fights werewolves. I cant even remember the name, underworld? And she, and some guy was in a car crash and landed in the water. She was knocked unconscious and nearly drowned, and had to be saved by a puny human. SHE NEARLY DROWNED. WHAT THE HELL? Vampires are (un)DEAD. Why would they need to breathe? Plus they are usually awesome, why would she need to be saved by a crappy human?

Right then and there I wrote of the movie as garbage. And it was. Dont even get me started on twilight, that shit doesnt exist in my world.

If you're gonna make something new, do it. Dont burden yourself with a name that really mean something else. If you're gonna interpret something in a new and (hopefully) exiting way, do it. But beware that you can fail. If you create something new, there is nowhere to fall (other than creating something dumb). If you fail to bring something new to the table (and try to), your creation is instantly lame, and cannot be saved.

Vampires are to me:

Undead
Sunlight at least hurts them in some way, if not outright destroys them
Drink blood
Usually powerful

If they dont have these qualities...you might want to call them something else imo.

If you put a fifth leg on a table its still a table. If you cut of all the legs, its just a tiny, useless floor.

 

[Elate]

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

vampire (n.) 1734, from French vampire or German Vampir (1732, in an account of Hungarian vampires), from Hungarian vampir, from Old Church Slavonic opiri (cf. Serbian vampir, Bulgarian vapir, Ukrainian uper), said by Slavic linguist Franc Miklo?iè to be ultimtely from Kazan Tatar ubyr "witch," but Max Vasmer, an expert in this linguistic area, finds that phonetically doubtful. An Eastern European creature popularized in English by late 19c. gothic novels, however there are scattered English accounts of night-walking, blood-gorged, plague-spreading undead corpses from as far back as 1196. Applied 1774 by French biologist Buffon to a species of South American blood-sucking bat.

The word came before the naming of the bat.

From: http://www.answers.com
With sources cited as:
Allen, Glover Morrill. Bats. New York: Dover Publications, 1939, pp.1-25.
Darwin, Charles. Journal of researches into the Natural history and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle Round the World. London: John Murray, 1879, p. 22.
Hill, John E., and James D. Smith. Bats: A Natural History. London: British Museum, 1984, pp. 158-64.
Robertson, James. The Complete Bat. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990, pp. 62-72.
Turner, Dennis C. The Vampire Bat: A Field Study in Behavior and Ecology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975, pp. 1-7.

"Two sixteenth-century Europeans, Dr. Oliedo y Valdez (1526) and M. Giroalme Benzoni, (1565) were the first to bring word of the vampire bat to their homelands. Benzoni, in his History of the New World, notes: There are many beasts which bite people during the night; they are found all along this coast to the Gulf of Paria and in other areas, but in no other part are they as pestiferous as in this province Nuevo Cartago, today Costa Rica; they have gotten to me at several places along this coast and especially at Nombre de Dios, where while I was sleeping they bit the toes of my feet so delicately that I felt nothing, and in the morning I found the sheets and mattresses with so much blood that it seemed that I had suffered some great injury. (Turner, 2)"

It also fits in with the discovery of South America as oppose to 1700, which makes no logical sense. So, as I originally stated, I think the term was applied after the discovery of the bat, since vampires as we currently know them were popularized in the 1800s, according to your own source.

 

[Poppy JR.]

"Die monster! You don't belong in this world!"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3llBqByNOUk

 

[Bestival]

Anyone else found that lately, because of all their weaknesses, vampires just aren't scary?
Let's do a run down:
The bible
Holy water
running water
spilled rice
garlic
not being invited in
decapitation
wooden stakes
silver
the sun
dead man's blood
crucifixes

You know what all these things have in common? They are all incredibly easy to obtain. Nothing about these monsters seems monstrous to me when all I have to do is throw a bucket of water at them or cross two sticks. They're even supposed to be easy as hell to recognize so in the end, where is the fear factor?

I don't think decapitation and wooden stakes should count as vampire specific... That shit will work on just about anything.
Also, the spilled rice is completely new to me, is that a (puking sounds) twilight thing? Even if not, I'm going to blame that for it anyway, that's just stupid.


As for me, I use Spike from the Buffy/Angel series as template for all vampires. Lost Boys too. Hard rockin', hard unliving anarchists that love a good fight.

 

[DEAD34345]

To me they don't sound like vampires, so I don't see why they would be named vampires by anything. Of course you can make a story about any kind of monsters you want, and call them whatever you want, it just seems a little strange when I don't see the connection. Presumably there'd be some explanation for that in the story.

The absolute most important feature of vampires as far as I'm concerned would be the blood drinking, if a creature/person doesn't do that then the word vampire wouldn't even cross my mind to describe them. Scariness/horror has little to do with it.

 

[white_wolf]

Vampires should be made to frighten not be eye candy first off the whole too atractive thing is where I think they've gotten alot wrong. Another place they go wrong is place them into stupid areas like space. So far the vampire movie I like the best is Interview with a Vampire more for its potential in the narrative then Brad Pitt. Moon Child also had some potential but did play on tried cliche as well. Regis from the Witcher books is a very neat character he's a herbalist whose given up drinking blood after he got beheaded and reformed many years later the way in which he conducts himself is very unique but then he goes and gets ruined with cliches like he turns into a gigantic bat or flies. To me he is intriquing character wise when he's not delving into tropes on his species.

With multiple re-occuring themes in modern vamp films like

beauty, wealth, obsession, lust, and a placement of one over the good of many.

In older films vampires weren't there for eye candy they could trick people and of course were out to kill them not love them.

There seems to also be rules like:

You must invite a vamp in in order for it to harm you, weakness to sunlight, blood and human blood mostly is the key for their survival, they trick and alter perception all this is also btw attributed to demons or the devil in old lore except most films do the whole they're cute so its ok and I love them/they love me so its all good and by doing this handwave of romance it cheapens the entire point of a vamp a predator of man this angle is not done often or well it should behave as such the film would be dark and if the vamp helps a human its for trickery it only wants to bleed this person or keep them as their fav living blood bank I've yet to see a film that goes dark and stays that way. When I find a twist tale of a vamp lying to a human it works the best. Films should message if you let the evil in it will consume you not if you let the evil in, love it enough, it will love you back forever.

So what I want to know is:

Why don't we have some poor vampires? or vamps who just suck socially, or all they want to do is play PC games. I mean have we ever had a tale of a bum vamp who preys on its fellow class who then becomes a (insert your profession here) but works for pennies deliberately and tries to deny his/her urges and make a rehab/retraining center for like minded vamps?

 

[Darth Sea Bass]

No doubt someone will have said this before me but I'll simply say... Not fucking shiny!

 

[Beffudled Sheep_v1legacy]

Anyone else found that lately, because of all their weaknesses, vampires just aren't scary?
Let's do a run down:
The bible
Holy water
running water
spilled rice
garlic
not being invited in
decapitation
wooden stakes
silver
the sun
dead man's blood
crucifixes

You know what all these things have in common? They are all incredibly easy to obtain. Nothing about these monsters seems monstrous to me when all I have to do is throw a bucket of water at them or cross two sticks. They're even supposed to be easy as hell to recognize so in the end, where is the fear factor?

I don't think decapitation and wooden stakes should count as vampire specific... That shit will work on just about anything.
Also, the spilled rice is completely new to me, is that a (puking sounds) twilight thing? Even if not, I'm going to blame that for it anyway, that's just stupid.


As for me, I use Spike from the Buffy/Angel series as template for all vampires. Lost Boys too. Hard rockin', hard unliving anarchists that love a good fight.

Old Eastern European and Chinese (I think, might be wrong) folklore say that Vampires have some sort of OCD when it comes to counting things so they'd leave millet or poppy seeds (In Europe) or many grains of rice (Asia) on the grave of a supposed vampire to give them something to occupy themselves with during the night instead of attacking people.
Its old and so far hasn't been used in any kind of modern media. So sorry no, it isn't from Twilight and its older than even the stake through the heart way of killing a vamp

 

[SoranMBane]

As long as the creature in question sustains itself by sucking the life energy (blood or otherwise) from living things, then I'm fine with just about anything being called a "vampire" in any work of fiction, no matter what other factors are present. The "vampire" could be attractive and brooding, an alien monster, or a blood-sucking fish mutant, and it can burn or melt or sparkle in the sun for all I care. As long as the story itself is well-written and interesting, I'll accept anything regardless of how well it follows the ill-defined "rules" of some fictional monster mythos.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

I don't really think that vampires have to be anything in particular. They've become a metaphor for the marginalized and the socially awkward - which in and of itself is fine - and the only really regrettable aspects the last few years have stuck on them have to do with Twilight's casual treatment of abusive relationships.

If you stick yourself to a very specific definition, you're pushing away large swaths of the Fantasy and Horror literary and cinematographic productions. The same way witches went from John Updyke victims to Frank L. Baum antagonists and back to hip suburbanites, vampires come to mean different things to different people from varying time periods. It's pretty much inescapable.

I remember liking the more Social Justice-oriented aspects of True Blood, for instance. Gay vampires who don't have the good fortune of having Lestat's bod and who look strikingly average are one of the several little interesting ways I've seen the series handle that angle.

As for the OP's concept - I'll agree in saying that there's no really nice way to put this. This feels like the kind of super-enthused brain fart I'm still prone to occasionally let out and that I've learned to be wary of. It's a little overwrought and, well...

Aliens? Dragon blood?! In what genre is this being placed? It's a hodgepodge of "Oh my God, this sounds so cool!" moments, but there's nothing tying them together.

 

[Heronblade]

snip

I don't think decapitation and wooden stakes should count as vampire specific... That shit will work on just about anything.
Also, the spilled rice is completely new to me, is that a (puking sounds) twilight thing? Even if not, I'm going to blame that for it anyway, that's just stupid.

No, its actually an old thing. Many of the original legends describe them as having what is now known as arithmomania, a type of OCD that manifests as an obsession with counting things.

In any event, the story goes that spilling a large quantity of something (beans, beads, seeds, whatever) in a location where you expect the vampire to go will compel it to stop and count them all, wasting the time it has to get back out of the open before the sun rises.

I have no bloody clue where those superstitious peasants got the idea that an undead monster of the night would have OCD...

P.S. Yes, this is indeed where Sesame Street's Count Von Count comes from.

 

[Storm Dragon]

To me, a vampire must have these three qualities:
-They drain blood (or sometimes a more abstract life force) from nonvampires for sustenance.
-They are harmed by sunlight. It need not be lethal, simply weakening or tiring them is enough, but none of this sparkly bullshit.
-They are very hard to kill, usually being only vulnerable to a small number of specific threats such as silver, stakes through the heart, and the like. Or maybe they're just exceptionally durable and heal quickly.

Feel free to go nuts with the other stuff, but these aspects are what I consider intrinsic to vampires.

 

[keniakittykat]

I know it isn't a popular opinion, but I think the best part of Twilight were the vampires. I'm serious.
The design and imagination of these things are a fresh breath of air compared to other vampire incarnations that are very similar to each other. (your well-dressed 'Interview with the vampire' pretty boy, or the monsters from 30days of night, pick one)

The movies suck balls, but it's not because of the vampires themselves.

 

[DoPo]

I don't think decapitation and wooden stakes should count as vampire specific... That shit will work on just about anything.

Depends - sometimes immortality does extend to cover these. Sure, you may end up with a head that is still alive after being separated by the body but still. As for the steak to the heart, it usually has a reason to work on vampires - it's symbolically pinning them to the ground where they belong[footnote]the heart can be the representation of the whole, or sometimes it's literally pinning a corpse to the ground and the location has no meaning[/footnote]. So staking does tend to hold special meaning for vampires, as opposed to other creatures, like, for example, werewolves (assume they have the healing factor) in which case while a stake through the heart would probably hurt, they'll be able to recover.